Meh Kitty: Online Forums Allow the Tricked to not be Tricked

The most recent XKCD comic features a man who has learned the art of “negging” from online forums of “pickup artists.” Negging is how pickup artists tear down a woman’s self esteem so that they then seek the approval of the pickup artist. However, when the character tries this on a woman, she is aware of negging and turns the tables on him. The comic doesn’t say this, but I imagine she probably learned about this online as well.

Recently, a colleague posted this image on Facebook:

A student had sent him a .jpg image file of this cat saying “Meh” and changed the file extension to .docx so that the teacher would think it was a corrupted .docx file, which would earn the student more time to finish the assignment. Luckily, my colleague had friends who could explain why his computer treated this .docx file like this. Evidently, as someone explained in their comment on the image, this tactic was featured on Reddit a few weeks prior. And other tactics exist, like corrupting a .docx file. But when students learn about these practices in online forums, so do teachers (see the last link, there’s some teachers thanking them for having this post). And with social networking sites where it’s easy to ask questions and crowdsource answers, even those teachers who don’t know about these tactics can quickly and easily learn from each other.